From June to August 2013, Forrester invited large and medium-size organizations in India to share details about their live enterprise mobility applications. Our objective was to understand how Indian organizations are leveraging mobile applications to better connect with customers, partners, and employees. In total, we received details of 59 mobile application projects from 41 organizations with more than 500 employees in India. These organizations are spread across verticals like manufacturing, financial services, automotive, media, healthcare, professional services, telecommunications, and utilities. Our research provided some interesting findings:

Mobile application development is skewed toward internal, employee-facing projects. Among the projects reviewed, 59% of the enterprise mobility applications have been developed for internal employees, 23% target customers, and the remaining 18% are for business partners. Most organizations in India are first developing applications for employees, because calculating the ROI is easier and more tangible for employee-centric applications as compared with customer- or business partner -centric applications. For instance, sales force/field force automation is currently the most commonly developed mobile application by Indian organizations.

The majority of projects are co-owned by IT and business. 71% of the enterprise mobility application projects we covered are jointly owned by the IT team and the relevant business stakeholders. Business inputs, especially on user interface and experience, are key to ensuring adoption of mobile application post-launch.